Queer

Think Death in Venice, but in Cuba and between consenting adults. Think E M Forster’s ‘only connect’. but in 1950’s Cuba. Luca Guadagnino, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey’s tense, squelchy, trippy, power dynamics relationship rages boldly onto the screen with a fantastic soundtracking of Nirvana at key moments.

Featuring very large centipedes, this is not a healthy place to be. Craig’s William Lee is a louche and lonely gay (or queer as the title and the times would have it) writer about town, in a Cuba sizzling with sex and hook-ups. Whilst he connects through the physical, what he’s really yearning for is to be loved, seen, liked, not an object of snipey ridicule. Whether he can admit this to himself in his possessive and objectifying relationship with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) is another matter.

Craig’s getting all the pundits, but Drew Starkey’s performance is astonishing. As the Death in Venice style fixated love interest, he too blazes onto the screen with a blast of Nirvana — and some significant eye contact. (Although it’s 1950’s Cuba). His nuances in his gaze, his small smiles and stoney serious expressions, his desire to still talk to and be with women, to recognise and be kind to them, to eat, to not drink all the time, to work, to capture the beauty of a moment through photography, to withdraw abruptly from meetings, people and locations are all subtly expressed. He’s more than the body Lee makes him, he’s a person! (and reminds Lee that he is too).

As woman watching this movie, it is uncomfortable. This is a world where women are not or are treated as objects of derision or ridicule, as interlopers, as very other. They exist purely to serve the beers and collect the empties. Or in removing themselves in social and public disgust and condemnation. Lee is very much defined by what he is not and women are a part of how he is defined socially and publicly.

We really feel Lee’s fragility in addiction and withdrawal symptoms — it’s excruciatingly painful to watch. We feel his suffering, and recoil at his stained fingers and dirty surroundings, how he drinks but doesn’t eat. However, as it turns out — both Lee and Eugene have secrets locked up inside them.

Though suggested, but never really explored, is the impact of sex tourism on a neighbourhood, a place, a nation. Western (mostly American) men are transplanting themselves to a presumably safe (for them) ex-pat community, where they create a sub-culture of bars, private clubs and exploit locals for cash. And as we see the locals are weary of them, though also willing or forced to take the cash. As Lee finds out, they find him laughable, ridiculous, literally a paid assignment. As his friend finds out, this leads to his flat becoming an easy target for theft of portable goods.

Yearning, possessive, trying to work out what it means to be a man like him (in a world that codifies him as unmanly) Lee keeps targeting wildly younger men, playing a guessing game of if they have infinity with his desires…or not. And how to ask this without asking. Looking and hoping, and despite his predatory behaviour, longing for tenderness.

Eugene clearly likes Lee as a person, but also wants to remain himself, independent, separate. There are some intriguing moments when he emotionally and violently asserts his own personhood against Lee’s emotional vampirism, pawing and need to connect through sex alone. Though billed as a romance, this is much less tender and emotionally connected that All of Us Strangers, and more about power dynamics, expressed and unmet needs, and perhaps ageing. We can see at points that Eugene feels used, treated as a sex object, an outlet and yet he enjoys talking with Lee, listening, spending time, being with him. Achingly vulnerable inspite of it all, Lee wants to please. Despite his almost insatiable desire to keep touching, he really wants to be liked — and most of all, really needs a hug.

Lee thinks he can achieve ultimate connection through a rare plant which enables telepathy — then he will be truly seen and known and be able to know and see others. In the meantime, he loses himself in deep addiction, hallucinating wild disembodied moments. You have to wonder if his travel adventures and belief are all part of his feeling a need to put on a show to display, impress, be heard.

Suddenly, we’re on a Kerouac road trip as the two journey to a remotely situated botanist (an unrecognisable gun-toting Lesley Manville) to find the plant and discover its effects. However, this leads to falling about in the jungle huntin’ shootin’ no fishin’; muddy contemporary dancing which eerily feels like 1930’s Nazi Olympian movies; wild Lair of the White Worm connections where in Alien-like ways he literally becomes part of his lover, snaking inside his skin, as one absorbed borg. Lee thinks he hears his lover say that he’s not like him and I guess tries to prove him wrong by inhabiting him.

Eugene keeps mentioning his injured rib and as they set out into ‘paradise’, you can’t help but feel the echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost in a bizarre alternate universe. Are Eugene and Lee meant to be the prototype new couple created in a brave new world where everything will be ‘perfect’ if they can just connect through the plant and with each other? In a literal all-consuming moment, Lee will prove that Eugene is ‘bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh’, but this is no paradise, no restoration - there is only the Fall. There’s a disconnection, a remove from the places they visit and the people they meet.

In a very strange episode walking back, Eugene literally vanishes and Lee pitches up without him, alone spinning in the universe. Lee seemingly finds the deep connection he’s been looking for through physicality, but does Eugene find out who he is? We don’t know if he killed himself, Lee killed him, someone else …or the addiction Eugene was also fighting caught up with him. Gun obsessive Lee envisions himself betraying his lover’s trust and vulnerability in a very Bondian don’t lose your head moment (with heaps of Dali thrown in). Even as an aged man, Lee is still crying out to connect (and with some Oppenheimer-style visuals) has a last try.

But given what an unreliable narrator Lee’s been so far, can we trust him or his visions? In fact can we trust what either of our protagonists tell us? Have they ‘only connected’ or not?

Support my writing and future cultural adventures for the price of a cup of coffee at: https://ko-fi.com/susanadventuresinculture